Monday, January 28, 2013

“There is more value created with overall
alignment than with local excellence.”–
-- Don Reinertsen

As I look back on over a decade of EA in the federal
government, I must say I am disappointed in the results so far.In my experience as an EA practitioner, I
have boiled down the role of EA to two areas:(1) Support decision-making by the business (mission) and IT leadership
– EA provides a repository of information about enterprise components and their
interrelationships in the form of a set of models that can be queried to gain
valuable insights; and (2) Provide guidance to IT to develop & deploy assets
that support the business.The role of
EA here is to help eliminate (or at least reduce) redundancy, inconsistency,
and inefficiency in IT and to promote alignment, sharing (reuse) and
interoperability across the enterprise.The first of these is an analytical role along the lines of business
intelligence (BI), using the EA repository as the knowledgebase.The second is a prescriptive role to evolve
the portfolio of IT assets in the strategic direction of the enterprise (based
on the EA Target Architecture).

Unfortunately, EA in practice seems to have come down
to two completely different things: (1) A compliance exercise to meet the
evaluation criteria of OMB and GAO.Never
mind the fact that both evaluation methods are intended to get agencies to
undertake “real” EA. Agencies seem
intent on doing as little as possible to score well on OMB and GAO assessments.
(2) A descriptive exercise that
typically focuses on the as-is situation.Although, “this is what we look like” does have some value, it is
limited and the exercise is very costly (ask DoD about the billion dollars
spent on the Business Systems Modernization program).But the primary shortcoming across many EA
programs is the lack of the intention to be prescriptive,
combined with the governance to make it happen.It is the second role and shortcoming that I wish to address here – EA
should provide the foundation for application development (AD) and
modernization.

The role of EA in AD lies in transforming abstract business
requirements from the problem space into concrete solutions that address these
requirements – while keeping all of the capabilities and solutions synchronized
to provide traceability.The most
successful organizations have adopted the SOA architectural style and apply it
at all levels of this transformation.At
the highest level, it involves depicting business requirements as capabilities
- discrete units of process, data and technology that allow you to accomplish
something of value.Modeling
capabilities (and their dependencies) is an important part of the Business
Architecture because it starts the componentization thought-process.As
you move across the problem/solution divide, these capabilities are transformed
into the services or solutions that implement them.

EA has two roles in this transformation.The first is to establish the rules and
parameters to guide the transformation. This includes setting standards,
similar to building codes, that must be adopted by development teams. These
include standards for development patterns, semantics and deployment platforms,
among others. While constraining, these
standards actually foster creativity and accelerate development because the
teams don't have to reinvent/readdress these issues – in the same way that
inventors of electrical appliances don’t have to worry about how to get
electricity to the appliance.The second
role for EA deals with the big picture. It
is to produce the overall (target) architecture of solutions, and the services
they consume, so that the development teams can build them out – similar to a
“table-top” model of a building or a community that shows how everything fits
together without providing the internal detail of each piece.The overall solution architecture as well as
the EA rules and constraints are provided to the acquisition process to be
incorporated into contract language that directs the design and development of
solutions. The solution architecture from the EA and the services consumed by
the solution are provided for incorporation in the RFPs and define what the
contractors are to build.

At the Solution Engineering phase of a program, EA should
provide the definitional clarity described above (denoting the components of
the architecture, their definitions, boundaries, and how they interoperate) as
well as more detailed artifacts to guide design and development, including
reference architectures and principles that identify patterns and platforms
that can/must be used by design/development teams.An example of a very successful architecture
principle at a high level is that all functionality must be service based, that
all interactions will occur through the service interfaces and that all service
interfaces must be externalizable.Amazon used this principle to implement all capabilities as services and
in the process created a business platform
to integrate all internal and external offerings. (ref.
Amazon; see Steve Yegge’s Rant, 2011).

During design and development, the EA team should perform
compliance reviews at appropriate stage gates to determine that the program is
building out the components of the architecture and is complying with the rules
and constraints.Today, most EA programs
review development progress “from an architectural perspective”.But without a model to compare it to, the
results are weak at best.In many cases,
development programs claim compliance with the EA because they can “map” their
application to the Reference Models, rather than demonstrating that they are
actually building out a part of a segment/domain architecture that will be reusable
by others.

The bottom line is that AD should operate in a manner
like most construction industries – develop an architecture and then build it,
preferably by assembling solutions from pre-built components.If the architecture is service based, it will
be modifiable on an incremental basis and thus should stand the test of
time.If the solution components are
specified and modeled in a rigorous manner, then automation (eg, code
generation) can accelerate the process and facilitate the
maintenance/enhancement process.

This is the concept that we at Everware-CBDI have based
our core competencies on.We call it Service
Oriented Application Modernization (SOAM) and it bridges EA and solution
development. SOAM consists of four
disciplines: SOA, Agile Development, Model Driven Development, and Portfolio
Transition Engineering.This approach
rapidly evolves the suite of IT assets to a set of rationalized, reusable
components that can be reconfigured to address new challenges.In the
process we are able to align development results with the business goals and
objectives.